PuroClean Emergency Recovery Services helps families of hoarders in the Greater Philadelphia region with the crisis of hoarding cleanup

Recently, our company was called out on a fire call to do fire damage restoration services at a home in Philadelphia. We have gone on many such calls in the last 7 ½ years. However, this call was different. When we arrived, the fire department was just leaving, after having satisfied themselves that this building was no longer at risk for burning. What we found inside was daunting. Every room in this small two bedroom one bathroom home was filled with “stuff.”
But, when I say filled, I mean from the floor to the ceiling in every room, including the bathroom.
So much “stuff” that there was no place to walk except through narrow 18 inch pathways to and from each room.

PuroClean Emergency Recovery Services helps families of hoarders in Philadelphia with the crisis of cleanup

Imagine piles and piles and stacks of stuff – discards from daily living: Pizza boxes, soda bottles, opened cans food, books, papers, magazines, and clothing. All of this mixed in with pet toys, pet excrement, and pet odor.
We had been called out to the home of a hoarder.

So shocked by what we found in the house in Philadelphia, I started to do a little research. What I discovered is that hoarding is a natural tendency in all animals, including humans. However, for some individuals, the tendency goes awry for lack of internal mental and emotional controls.

So how does the natural hoarding tendency work?

It goes like this: imagine you have a pair of jeans that you love. You’ve had these jeans for several years and they’ve been with you during some of the best times of your life. You’ve worn them well. Now, you’ve worn them out. So now, you don’t wear them at all because there are holes in inappropriate places that can’t be seen in public. However, you’re loathe to get rid of them because of all the happy memories you associate with wearing them. So, they stay in the bottom of your drawer, underneath your new jeans.

Media accounts of hoarding have a long history in the United States going back to the Collyer brothers who both died in March of 1947 in their Harlem mansion because they starved and were smothered by their “stuff.” Recently, the 2009 show Hoarders that airs on A&E and the 2010 documentary Hoarding: Buried Alivethat airs on TLC, have raised public awareness of hoarding and its dangers. Along with the “fire trap” danger we witnessed in the Philadelphia home, there is also a danger of disease and infection from rodent and pest infestation.

There is now a diagnosis for “hoarding diagnosis” listed in the DSM-V, the psychiatric “bible” of diagnostic and statistical information used to categorize mental illness.

Many professionals were stumped because unlike typical obsessive-compulsive disorders, people who exhibit hoarding behaviors don’t respond to standard antidepressant drug treatment. So, a new formal diagnosis was created so that research and treatment methods would be developed for people who forget how to let things go.

What makes hoarders different from the rest of us is the immediate physical danger, pain and suffering they have created for themselves in the present because they have been trying to avoid the pain and suffering of letting go of the past.

For many people, the hoarding behaviors don’t start until later in life. After an aged mother or father dies, the family arrives at the home of the deceased parent only to find that they have to clean out the stock-piled memories of their parent’s lives. And then it’s time to clean out so the home can be sold. For others, the tendency to hoard begins as early as age 12.

For the couple living in the Philadelphia home with the fire, no one knows when the hoarding tendency started. The family member who owned the home was shocked when she saw the property.

We did what we do best: assisting the homeowner and the residents with caring and compassion by taking the time to educate them about the process of hoarding cleanup and the steps we were going to take to bring the property back to habitable conditions.

There is still much work to do on this property and I will keep you posted in a future blog to let you know how it’s going.

Unfortunately, our work is only the first step. Rehabilitating the home by completely clearing the debris and cleaning and repairing the structure will only return it to use by the homeowner. The residents will need to seek rehabilitation too so that the hoarding problem doesn’t come home with them when they move back in.

So if you or someone you love has a problem with hoarding in the Philadelphia area and would like help, we’ve listed some of the mental health professionals in our area with their contact information who specialize in treating hoarding disorders. This is not an exhaustive list, but information I obtained through the http://childrenofhoarders.com website.If you know of other mental health resources in the Greater Philadelphia and South Jersey area, please contact us and we will include that information here as well.

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